Thursday, December 12, 2013

Sensory play experiences offer engaging learning opportunities for children, especially toddlers and preschoolers. For Tot School, we're focusing on a Letter of the Week approach and exploring all five senses with each letter. Instead of sharing ALL of our Letter J activities on the blog, I've been sharing some on my Facebook page and on G+. We smelled and "painted" with Jasmine tea, had a fun juice tasting experience, and listened to jets on a recent trip. For sight and touch, I'm sharing our Jumble Jars and Jolly Jell-O sensory tray today, as well as "lots and lots and lots and lots" (as Wild Thing would say) of Winter Sensory Play Ideas from the Kid's Co-Op. Enjoy and then share your favorite holiday sensory play idea with me!

I made red jell-o and put it on a tray with jewels sprinkled in for the boys to find. Underneath our clear tray was our felt letter J. The boys loved touching the squishy jell-o, especially Caterpillar (2). We also added in some green fish-shaped ice cubes with Wild Thing squealing with delight that J is for jellyfish! Our jolly tray was complete as the boys explored the red and green mixture full of hidden gems. (And, yes, they went straight into the bathtub afterwards as they were sticky!)

We also created and explored jumble jars. Our jumble jars and the jewels were the letter J items we could see as we explored the letter J through our sense of sight. This also gave us a chance to introduce a new vocabulary word to the boys: jumble, which is such a fun word to say!

Caterpillar, particularly, enjoyed emptying and filling up the jars over and over.
The J jar on the right was initially filled with milk caps with letter J stickers on them.